25 Shocking Questions Buzzfeed Has About Jurassic Park

It’s been a slow few weeks, folks. We’ve only had two new castings for Jurassic World 2: Ancient Futures (?), Ted Levine and Daniella Pineda,and that’s about it. The New York Toy Fair is this month, so hopefully we’ll see some new Mattel Jurassic World toys, but until then this is the best I can give you: Buzzfeed has a trending piece called 25 Questions I Have About “Jurassic Park” Now That I’m An Adult, and I felt compelled to do Alfredo Murillo and his readers a favor by answering all of them.

1. Isn’t a goat too small a meal for a Tyrannosaurus rex?

Not really. T. rex stomachs were more easily filled than you’d think; this was addressed in the original JP novel. But not many people have both read the book and seen the movie, so I wouldn’t expect every single JP viewer to know this.

2. And why didn’t it eat the leg?

T. rex ate by picking up its prey and thrashing it around, so the leg probably just detached and flew off, it wasn’t purposefully omitted.

3. Why were there so few employees in that park?

John Hammond was very proud of how little staff it took to keep the park running. That pride, as we see throughout the rest of the movie, was one of the main reasons the park failed. Hammond liked to brag a lot in the novel about how much the park ran on automation.

4. What exactly is a mathematician supposed to contribute to this journey?

Ian Malcolm was one of the initial consultants on the project; his work in chaos theory applied to biological systems was highly applicable to an unstable system like this park. Malcolm deals with the unpredictable for a living, and Jurassic Park was very unpredictable.

And does there really need to be a reason to include this face?

5. So people could go to the park and see NOTHING if the dinosaurs didn’t bother to come to the fence?

Probably; I don’t remember the book ever addressing this, but I would assume that park staff would take some kind of measures to make a couple of dinosaurs walk into view if absolutely none of them showed up. In the novel, the hypsilophodonts wouldn’t show their faces until the park’s speaker system played mating calls.

6. If the cars drove themselves, what did they need steering wheels for?

Probably for aesthetic reasons, and/or they just didn’t feel the need to take out the steering wheels when they repurposed the jeeps.

7. Couldn’t they do a better job on Mr. DNA, considering that they had CREATED DINOSAURS?

Can you blame Hammond for allocating more money to the dinosaur budget than the animation budget?

8. How could Alan Grant carry a six-inch raptor claw in his pocket for a whole day and still have a leg?

He probably positioned it in such a way that he wouldn’t stab him, or the claw wasn’t as sharp as it looked.

Plus you know he does this often enough that he’s figured out how to carry around a claw comfortably– you know, for those times when you need to traumatize kids on the go.

9. Was it necessary for John Hammond to be in every single presentation at the park?

This is yet another factor that shows that the park wasn’t really so well-planned-out after all– more proof that Hammond didn’t think through all of this as much as he says he did.

10. How does Ellie expect to find anything in a five-foot-high pile of dung?

She’s… very dedicated to her work.

11. How the hell does the Dilophosaurus get into Dennis Nedry’s car?

It probably snuck in when Dennis opened the door to get in himself, or broke a window. I seem to recall the old Jurassic Park Legacy site having a more detailed answer to this; it’s archived somewhere if it did, but hell if I know where.

12. And how does the T. rex get into the visitor center for the final scene? Does it duck to fit its head through the door frame?

Rexy actually ducks her head to get through the area of the visitor center that’s still under construction and that’s covered by a transparent tarp– we see one of the raptors enter through there. JPLegacy also had a more detailed explanation of this, although you might have to PM someone on the Jurassic Park Portal Forum to get it.

13. Why didn’t Tim climb in between the wires rather than over them? He clearly could have!

If you look more closely at the wires, it’s actually a tighter squeeze than it looks at first glance, and he might’ve gotten scraped up if he’d tried to climb through. Plus, considering everything Tim’s been through in the past 12 hours, give him a break for having a little lapse in critical thinking.

14. Didn’t they go a little overboard with cooking if they were expecting only six guests?

Hammond probably just wanted to impress them and show that he spared no expense.

15. All right, they cloned the dinosaurs by using blood extracted from mosquitoes, but how the hell did they make the plants?

The (far superior) old Jurassic World website or the original JP novel could’ve given a more definitive answer to this, but Wu and the other scientists probably messed around with the DNA of modern plants that were related to ancient plants. Or, to extrapolate, they could’ve found plant DNA in the preserved stomach contents of herbivorous dinosaurs.

16. What did they tell this guy’s family? (in reference to the man who was eaten by the raptor at the very beginning of the movie)

According to the book, they told everyone who didn’t work for the park that the man was mauled in a machinery accident.

17. Whose idea was it to put explosives next to the enclosure with Velociraptors?

Probably Muldoon, the gamekeeper’s, idea, because he wanted to be able to kill as many raptors as quickly as possible in the event of a breakout.

18. Why are there Velociraptors next to the visitor center?

The raptors were one of the park’s showpieces, and Hammond probably wanted them to be the first thing guests saw when they came to the park.

19. Where the hell is the other half of this helicopter’s seat belt?

The sloppily constructed seatbelts of the helicopter are yet another example of just how poorly-executed Jurassic Park was. There’s also an excellent metaphor in that sequence.

20. What are glasses of water doing on the dashboard of a car?

If I had to guess, the guests probably got little glasses of water at the visitor’s center and just happened to put them on the dashboard. I wouldn’t be surprised if the jeeps didn’t have cupholders, too.

21. Why is the only thing left standing after the T. rex attacks Gennaro the toilet? Were there no sinks?

The sinks were probably attached to the walls, and the walls got knocked to the side; also, the toilet was cemented to the ground in a way that sinks wouldn’t be.

22. And why did they carry flares? Weren’t they a bit too well prepared for the worst case scenario?

The park was prepared for some things but not others, and while Hammond didn’t take every possible precaution for visitor safety, he did take some.

23. Why did the idea that the dinosaurs could change their sex occur to Alan Grant and not to the scientists who created them?

The idea probably did occur to Wu and the scientists, but they thought they’d successfully messed with the dinos’ genes enough to prevent it, that or they weren’t given enough time to do so because of Hammond’s deadlines.

24. How the hell does Alan Grant know that dinosaurs are warm-blooded simply by looking at them?

He doesn’t really know that so much as he guesses it, and he probably guesses it because they don’t look very reptilian.

25. And most importantly, Phil, where the heck were you while the dinosaurs were busy eating people?!

Phil himself has answered this one:

Apologies to my regular readers for the unimaginitive post; hopefully the Toy Fair and further castings will provide me with something new to report on soon.

You know, even as a child it bugged me how people didn’t figure how Rexy got into the building. It was incomplete and as you mentioned they showed the raptors getting in that way.

The food served always bugged me, too. It seemed too heavy. I would think they would serve fast food. The more I watch JP, the more I don’t like Alan’s character. Half the time he is a jerk just to be one. The other half, he knows all of these things about raptors you wouldn’t know by just studying their bones. Two, they’re not real raptors. Even if they were (excluding all the other DNA in them), they were raised in completely different circumstances than they fossils he’s studied.

I guess Alejandro the chef just really wanted to show off, especially since the visitors barely touched his Chilean sea bass, lol. And I totally understand about not liking Alan, I never had a soft spot for him myself. I want his job, though.

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Hi, I'm Raptor Dash. I love Jurassic Park and hope to be a paleontologist someday. Until then, I write about dinosaurs. This is where I publish my fanfics, including ones I don't post on other sites. I also recommend fanfics by other talented JP writers and update on Jurassic World news.